Covering a record exhibition areas of more than 300,000 square meters in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province, this year's China Hi-Tech Fair will display the world's cutting-edge technologies and promote exchanges to explore emerging areas and potential fields.

Running through Tuesday to Saturday, CHTF has attracted more than 5,000 exhibitors from nearly 40 countries and regions, of which about one-fourth were Fortune Global 500 companies, listed companies, industrial leaders and high-growth enterprises that have been key players in segmented sectors, according to the organizer.

The company exhibitors are arranged in two exhibition centers of Shenzhen — one is in the city center of Futian district with about 100,000 sq m and the other is located near the airport in Bao'an district, which started operation in September 2019.

This is the fair's 24th session, which has been jointly sponsored by seven ministries, two top academies of China and the city government of Shenzhen since 1999. It has been widely regarded as a window to showcase the opening-up of China's high-tech industry and a significant platform for the commercialization of high-tech achievements that venture capital and investment institutes are actively participating in.

The sponsors — in the fields of commerce, science and technology, industry and information, reform, agriculture and intellectual properties — have organized the most diversified new technologies and products to the fair.

They fall in a wide range of categories, including biomedicine, modern agriculture, aerospace, telecommunications, blockchain, big data and artificial intelligence.

To enrich the ecosystem for innovation, the sponsors of the fair invited a couple of research institutions, dozens of leading universities including Tsinghua and Peking universities, venture capital institutes and financial consultancy companies to attend CHTF.

The fair has nurtured many startups to grow to industrial leaders, such as Tencent, BYD and Han's Laser, over the past two decades.

Several forums will be staged during the fair to inspire new ideas, which will be attended by government officials, international organizations' leaders, top scientists, renowned entrepreneurs and investors.

X-Lake Forum, the main forum of the fair, will be held on Tuesday, centering on the themes of openness, integration and the future. Thirteen parallel forums will explore topics including science and technology, education, industries, finance, talents and the synergic development of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao.

Themes such as metaverse, emerging technologies that might change the world, innovation and life science will be discussed in other forums of the fair, according to the organizer.

The Water Conservation and Innovation Exhibition, a show to exhibit the latest water-saving technologies and achievements, will be held for the first time as a part of CHTF, together with a high-tech talents attraction show and an expo for emergency safety. All of the three professional fairs will enrich the content of CHTF, the organizer said.

The water-saving show has captured the trend of going green and low-carbon and focuses on environmental protection, new energy, green materials and energy-saving applications. It will support Shenzhen to be a model city in saving water.

To aid the experience for exhibitors and visitors who are not able to attend the fair, the organizer also upgraded its online system to be equipped with 5G-plus ultra-high definition videos as well as virtual reality technology.

All of the displays, the projects looking for partners and investors and cloud forums can be viewed through livestream broadcasting. The reviews and the system can also allow real-time interaction and business talks.

The function has been happily welcomed by a couple of international delegations, such as the education and science ministry of Russia and the Bavarian government of Germany, to organize local companies and institutions to exhibit online. Some of them have attended the fair for more than 20 years.

Some delegations have adopted a combined model that brings some of the companies to the site while some attend the online show. For example, the Swissnex in China — a Switzerland-based education and research organization — has organized a dozen of growth enterprises including SynSense to attend the fair either online or on site.

CzechTrade has invited Skoda, a car brand of Volkswagen based in the Czech Republic, and several industrial leaders in the country in high-end manufacturing, energy and environmental protection areas to attend the fair.